My daily readings 02/19/2011

My app did pretty well in the ranking with 45% retention rate, but then after almost a year i released a new version and apparently some user realized that she still have my app installed and this dropped the retention from 45% to 36%.

However the comments and ratings are now even better. I had good ratings 50%+ 5 stars, then 10% for 4, 3, 2, 1 stars, and very well comments. Nowdays I got only 5 stars, but now I’m dropped from 6-8th place to 30th place.

Chu admitted that Google is a bit disappointed by the sales ofpaid apps on the Android Market, describing the company as “nothappy”. As a result, it’s planning a number of initiatives to tryand boost the figures a little.

Firstly, Android will be getting an in-app payments system in the first quarter of 2011, whereusers can make purchases within an app.

Access to a social graph is increasingly important for appdevelopers too. Google is planning to utilise your handset’saddress book to tap your social network, as the likes of Facebook,Twitter and others already interface with it on Android.

In my time working with the Android Market (which would be about a year and a half), I’ve watched two different apps, one paid and one free, fluctuate in rankings. I’ve also watched how other apps across all categories perform over time. Early on I realized there was no standard order like on the iPhone app store. With iTunes, rank is purely download based. Sell the most, you’re the top. It’s simple, it works, and people want to sort products by bestselling (e.g. BestBuy.com, New York Times Bestseller list, etc). But Google had other ideas…

All of this was gathered at Android conferences like Google I/O and keeping my ears open in the Android development community. I saw a tweet once from what I believe was a Google Labs session where the audience was told that anonymous usage statistics (i.e. length an app is usage and frequency) is a factor. How does that even make any sense? I can run a GPS app for 8 hours, but only spend 10 seconds with a Tip Calculator app. Both are listed in the same category. One would benefit and the other would suffer.